According to IDG's Stephen Lawson, Sprint COO Len Lauer said last week that his company plans to select a 4G technology by the end of August and start deploying the system in 2008.

"The company holds licenses for radio spectrum in the 2.5GHz band that covers about 85 percent of the U.S. population and has publicly explored both WiMax and Flash-OFDM as technologies to supplement its current 3G network with a higher-speed mobile data service," Lawson writes.

Lauer's hope, Lawson says, is that mobile operators worldwide will settle on a single unified 4G technology.

Still, Lawson says other mobile tech executives aren't looking quite so far ahead. "I think most of our customers would be satisfied if we did 3G well," says Orange CEO Sanjiv Ahuja.